Electronic device has been developed rapidly in recent years. Due to the diversity of screen size of the electronic device, menu design to support operation on the screen for applications running on the electronic device becomes significant recently. Usually, user menus in current applications are designed in linear layout, and can pop up further menu items (also called menu entry) if needed. Traditional linear layout menu design, such as a rectangular menu, will occupy too much screen area. Also, the traditional design for menu could not hold too many items due to the limitation of screen size, and would cause misoperation if there are more menu items. Therefore, a linear layout menu and its pop menu items are not convenient for user interaction.
Circular application menu is a menu in a circular form displayed in desktop. The icon or symbol of each menu item is laid around the circle. If a user or operator clicks on the icon, another circular menu laid under the icon of the menu item will be displayed. The circular application menu is already running on Ubuntu desktop. Since it requires a second menu circle to be displayed, it is not flexible to extend to multiple levels of menus.
Orbit discovered at the Donation Coderforum provides a circle menu to Windows, which could be invoked by middle-mouse clicking. A user could add or remove an item in the menu, wherein the menu item is a shortcut for an application, such as IE. The circle menu provided by Orbit is mostly like an app shortcut container. There is no connection between a menu item and its subordinate items.
Quicksilver radial menu can open up a transparent circle around the current item being selected. For example, if a user opens a folder, the quicksilver radial menu shows contents of the folder arrayed in a circle. The quicksilver radial menu is mostly like a wigdet for file explorer. It cannot support multiple level menus, and can not navigate between different levels.